Canadians Awarded Turing Award for Pioneering Work in Artifical Intelligence

The Turing Award is an annual prize awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field".

As reported by the MIT Technology Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the CBC and Wired, among others, ACM has named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun as recipients of the 2018 Turing Award for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing".

• Bengio is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operational Research at the University of Montreal and a Scientific Director at Mila, Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute;
• Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow of Google, Chief Scientific Adviser of The Vector Institute, and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto; and
• LeCun is a Professor of Computer Science, Neural Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University and VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook.

Hinton, LeCun and Bengio developed conceptual foundations for the field of Artificial Intelligence, identified surprising phenomena, and contributed advances that demonstrated the advantages of deep neural networks. In recent years, deep learning methods have been responsible for breakthroughs in, among other things, computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and robotics.

By the early 2000s, despite the majority of the field having moved away from the use of artificial neural networks, LeCun, Hinton and Bengio remained committed. Their commitment has recently resulted in major advances and their methodology is now the dominant paradigm in the field.

Author: Jordan Scopa